Budgeting With All The Funds You Have Now

I had a conversation with a person today on whether or not we should expand certain resources for this activity as it seems like it has been growing to the point where it would be justifiable. However, of course the issue of money plays a role and when presented with how much the non profit actually brought in a year he immediately reacted humorously in a way to imply that with those numbers for sure they can’t expand at the moment.

There were then some talks about how it sounds so little though in terms of how much we would need to expand the resources and so instead we should take a expand a now and worry about the money later approach. In a situation where funds are unstable this would remind me of say constantly piling up one’s credit card bills with like $5 meals as at the time it seems so little anyways. But eventually it adds up and not having a stable income flow usually results in more stress than its worth.

I personally still believe in situations like this you should budget with what you actually have. For example, if you want that new service that will be say $120/year, even if you are only paying $10/month you should make sure that you actually do have $120 in the bank so all you are doing is re-distributing the funds. In this case, do the fund-raising first and see if you can get enough as opposed to hoping you can get it later.